Santorum to Scouts: Don’t let gays in

Ex-Sen. Rick Santorum, runner up for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, is appealing to the Boy Scouts of America board, meeting this week, not to change its rules to give local Scout troops the option of accepting gay Scouts or Scoutmasters.

If it does admit gays, argues Santorum, the Scouting movement will be succumbing to “the harmful effects of societal change” and giving victory to “lawyers, anti-Scouting public officials and liberal Christian denominations” who have kept “the Boy Scouts in their cross-hairs” despite losing a 2000 case in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Santorum is now a columnist for World Net Daily, a conservative website best known for advancing the “birthers'” specious argument that President Obama was not born in the United States. A veteran crusader against gay rights, he implores the Scouts in the kind of thunderous rhetoric familiar to right-thinking readers of wnd.com

Rick Santorum. Photo by Getty Images

“Scouting may not survive this transformation of American society, but for the sake of the average boy in America, I hope the board of the Scouts doesn’t have its fingerprints on the murder weapon,” Santorum writes.

In equally stark terms, Santorum describes the “transformation” he is talking about:

“Over the past 50 years, the left in America has successfully transformed American society. Among the long list of liberal victories is the growth of the welfare state, sexual liberation, removing God from the public square, abortion, affirmative action, redistribution of wealth, more government control of business, radical environmentalism and the transformation of the family.”

Santorum campaigned against same-sex marriage in Washington last year, first visiting Olympia as the Legislature was on the eve of passing marriage equality, and later delivering denunciations of Referendum 74 at Spokane and Seattle events for the Family Research Council of Washington.

Santorum has also carried on a lengthy feud with Dan Savage, editorial director of The Stranger, after Santorum evoked bestiality in denouncing the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in “Lawrence vs. Texas” that threw out state anti-sodomy laws as a violation of privacy.

President Obama, honorary president of the Boy Scouts of America, told CBS News in a pre-Super Bowl interview that he supports changing the organization’s rules. “My attitude is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does, in every institution and walk of life,” Obama said. He described the Scouts as “a great institution.”

Santorum takes a radically different view.

“Wednesday’s vote is a challenge to the Scouts’ very nature and is another example of the left attempting to remove God from all areas of public life,” he writes. Santorum argues that giving local troops an option is not the “thoughtful compromise” it is cracked up to be.

“First, the policy change will remove the legal protection given to (troops that won’t admit gays) by the most recent Supreme Court case that permitted the BSA to include or exclude members based upon commonly held ‘viewpoints’,” he argues.

“If those principles are now optional, every troop that doesn’t want a homosexual or atheist scoutmaster will be sued. That assumes those troops run by faith-based individuals and church hosts will stay with the Boy Scouts. Many will simply leave and pursue alternative ways to continue to invest in the development of their young men’s character, leaving the Scouts hollowed out at its core.”

The Scouts’ membership has declined more than 21 percent in the years since the Supreme Court upheld the movement’s ban on gays.

Santorum has hinted that he may run for the White House again in 2016.